We had an offer in on the Poe House, but it was countered and we decided not to counter again. This was sort of a last ditch effort to find a house in Charlotte. It’s now time for a break while we collect our thoughts, spend some time back home in Michigan and determine our course. I wish things were easier right now, but nothing is easy in this economy, so why bother feeling down about it? I’m going to have to buy another copy of the Grapes of Wrath, since my own copy is buried in some warehouse back home. We (us, our country) are nowhere near the edge of turmoil experienced by those who survived the Depression or are we? Is it simply that our poor are better hidden in the shadows cast off corporate buildings?

I’m researching an ancestor of mine (or piggybacking off the research of my step-father), McDonald Clarke- known by many as “The Mad Poet” and revered for his eccentricities and his innocence. He often found himself poor and alone, but many, including the best poets of his day, marveled at his uncanny ability to smile in the face of cruelty, to find decency in anyone and to seek out the stars through a large hole in his attic-room roof, rather than suffer the misery of defeat of being poor. In his poem, Humility, Clarke writes,

And we are by no means poor, but we feel the pinch and empathetically are suffering with the worst off for we know these are families not unlike our own. And because we have had to worry at times in our own lives about from where our next meal might come.

The beauty in these times is that they are less superficial. Sincerity seems to flow in all art, music, from the pen. These are times when we build strong foundations – not of brick and mortar, but of friendships that will lead us through the hard times.